As God Commands

Also by Niccolo Ammaniti

I'm Not Scared

I'll Steal You Away

Niccolo Ammaniti

Translated from the Italian by
Jonathan Hunt

PROLOGUE
1

BEFORE

Friday
21

Saturday
99

Sunday
135

THE NIGHT
141

AFTER

Monday
293

Tuesday
338

Wednesday
383

"Wake up! Wake up, for fuck's sake!"

Cristiano Zena gasped, and clutched at the mattress as if the
ground had opened up under his feet.

A hand clamped around his throat. "Wake up! You know you
should always sleep lightly. It's when you're sleeping that they fuck
you over!"

"It's not my fault. The alarm clock didn't..." the boy murmured.
He twisted free of that vice-like grip and lifted his head off the pillow.

But it's night time, he thought.

Outside the window everything was pitch-black, except where the
streetlamp shed a yellow cone of light, into which snowflakes as big
as balls of cotton wool were falling.

"It's snowing," he said to his father, who was standing in the
middle of the room.

A shaft of light crept in from the hall, picking out Rino Zena's
shaven head, his beaky nose, his moustache and goatee beard, his
neck and one muscular shoulder. Instead of eyes he had two black
holes. His chest was bare. Below, his army trousers and paintsplashed boots.

How can he stand this cold? thought Cristiano, stretching out his
fingers toward the bedside lamp.

"Don't turn it on," said Rino. "It's annoying."

Cristiano curled up under the warm tangle of blankets and sheets.
His heart was still pounding. "Why did you wake me?"

Then he noticed that his father was holding the pistol. When he
was drunk he often got it out and wandered around the house
pointing it at the television, the furniture, the lights.

"How can you sleep?" Rino turned toward his son.

His voice was hoarse and dry, as if he had swallowed a handful
of chalk.

Cristiano shrugged. "I just do..."

"Congratulations." His father took a beer can out of his pants
pocket, opened it, drained it in one swig and wiped his beard with
his arm, then crushed it and threw it on the floor. "Can't you hear
him, that bastard?"

There wasn't a sound. Not even the cars that flashed past the
house day and night so close that if you closed your eyes they seemed
to be going right through the room.

It's the snow. Snow deadens noise.

His father went over to the window and rested his head against
the pane, wet with condensation. Now the light from the hall caught
his deltoids and the cobra tattoo on his shoulder. "You sleep too
deeply. In wartime you'd be the first to get it."

Cristiano concentrated and heard in the distance the hoarse bark
of Castardin's dog.

It was a sound so familiar his ears no longer registered it. Like the
buzz of the neon light in the hall and the leaky toilet.

"The dog?"

"About time ... I was starting to worry." His father turned back
toward him. "He hasn't stopped barking for a second. Not even in
the snow."

Cristiano remembered what he had been dreaming about when
his father had woken him up.

Downstairs in the sitting room, next to the television, there was
a large phosphorescent fish tank containing a squishy green jellyfish that spoke a strange language, all Cs, Zs and Rs. And the
amazing thing was that he could understand every word.

What time is it? he wondered, with a yawn.

The luminous dial of the clock radio on the floor showed three
twenty-three.

His father lit a cigarette and snorted: "I'm fucking fed up."

"It's half stupid, that dog," said Christiano. "With all the beatings it's taken..."

Now that his heart had stopped pounding, Cristiano felt sleep
pressing down on his eyelids. His mouth was dry and full of the
taste of garlic from the takeout chicken. A drink of water might have washed that foul taste away, but it was too cold to go down
to the kitchen.

He felt like resuming the dream about the jellyfish from where
he had left off. He rubbed his eyes.

Why don't you go to bed? The question was on the tip of his
tongue, but he checked it. From the way his father was pacing
around the room there wasn't much chance of him calming down.

Three stars.

Cristiano ranked his father's rages on a five-star scale.

No, three to four. Already in the "approach with caution" area,
where the only strategy was to agree with everything he said and
keep out of his way as much as possible.

His father turned around and kicked a white plastic chair, which
hurtled across the room and fetched up against the pile of boxes
where Cristiano kept his clothes. No, he had been wrong. This was
five stars. Red alert. Here the only thing to do was to shut up and
blend in with your surroundings.

His father had been in a filthy mood for the past week. A few
days earlier he had lost his temper with the bathroom door because
it wouldn't open. The lock was broken. For a couple of minutes
he had fiddled with a screwdriver. He had knelt there, swearing
and heaping curses on Fratini, the locksmith who had sold it to
him, the Chinese manufacturers who had made it out of tin, and
the politicians who allowed such crap to be imported, as if they
all were standing there in front of him. But it was no good, the
door just wouldn't budge.

One punch. Another one, harder. Another. The door had leaped
on its hinges, but hadn't come open. Rino had gone to his bedroom,
got the gun and fired at the lock. But it still hadn't yielded. The
only result had been a deafening bang, which had left Cristiano
dazed for half an hour.

There had been one good thing about this: it had taught Cristiano
that, contrary to what the movies would have us believe, you can't
open a door by shooting at its lock.

In the end his father had started kicking the door. He had smashed
it in, shouting and tearing out strips of wood with his bare hands.
When he had got inside the bathroom he had punched the mirror,
and shards of glass had gone everywhere and he had cut his hand and had sat for a long time dripping with blood on the edge of the
bath, smoking a cigarette.

"What the fuck do I care if it's half stupid?" replied Rino, after
thinking it over for a while. "I'm fucking fed up with it. I've got to
go to work tomorrow."

He came toward his son and sat down on the edge of his bed.
"Do you know something that really shits me? Stepping out of the
shower in the morning, soaking wet, and putting my feet on the
freezing cold tiles, and at the risk of breaking my neck." He smirked,
loaded the pistol and held it out to him by the barrel: "I was thinking
that what we need is a nice new dogskin mat."

At three thirty-five in the morning Cristiano Zena left the house
wearing green rubber boots, his checked pajama pants and his
father's windproof jacket. In one hand he held the pistol, in the
other a flashlight.